Suddenlink has announced that three more communities have received gigabit speeds from the cable operator. The company's announcement notes that Georgetown, Texas, Lake Charles, Louisiana, and St. Joseph, Missouri now have access to Suddenlink's gigabit offerings. Users in our forums say they're being told this service is 1 Gbps down, 50 Mbps up, costs $110 a month (plus a $35 technician/install fee) and comes with a 550 GB monthly cap.
In conversations with the company, Suddenlink tells me that these deployments are a hybrid coaxial (DOCSIS 3.0) and fiber solution.
"With equipment upgrades and channel bonding, the network is scalable to provide more than 1 Gig speed to the modem, as others are doing now," company spokesman Gene Regan tells me via e-mail. "And with DOCSIS 3.1 equipment expected next year, even faster speeds will be possible."
A little more than a year ago Suddenlink announced it was joining the 1 Gbps fiber to the press release craze by proudly proclaiming they'd be bringing 1 Gbps service to 90% of the company's footprint by 2017. Like Cox, Suddenlink hopes to do this using the unfinished DOCSIS 3.1 standard, which isn't expected to be commercially available in volume until 2016.
Suddenlink is calling the whole upgrade plan "Operation GigaSpeed," (pdf) which the ISP says will bump the company's 15 Mbps tier to 200 Mbps, and the company's 107 Mbps tier to 1 Gbps. The company has also been quick to take a few shots at Google and AT&T for not having more uniform gigabit deployments.
"In sharp contrast to companies like Google and AT&T, which are offering a Gigabit service only to a few neighborhoods in primarily urban markets, we're making our service available in all of the neighborhoods and households passed by our network throughout the Greenville area." said Jared Sonne from Suddenlink.
